How to Create An Amazing Investor Pitch Deck

by Adam Noar

Putting together a successful pitch can be a time intensive task. However, the rewards of raising money to get your company off the ground make it well worth it.
The truth is, if you want to wow your potential investors, and collect some cash, you need to put together an exciting presentation that will motivate your audience to reach into their pockets.

Here are 5 tips to make sure that your next investor presentation goes well.

1. Throw Out The Business Plan

Investors simply don’t have the time to read through bulky business plans, as well thought out as they may be. What you should be focusing on instead is putting together a SIMPLE STORY through a minimal slide deck (think 7-10 slides). With a small slide deck, you can email a couple of the slides to your investors ahead of time to excite their interest before your in-person meeting. Also, after the meeting, you can email them your full slide deck in order to recap your presentation and remind them of the amazing story you just told them in person.

2. Give Yourself Plenty of Time & Collect Feedback

If you’re going to put together a deck that is truly exciting, you need to make sure that you give yourself plenty of time. Presentations that are rushed never come out well. You need to be able to give yourself breaks to allow your thoughts to settle and creative energy to flow.

You also want to make sure that you’re sharing your presentation with knowledgeable friends, mentors, and other business professionals in order to make sure that your story is clear, concise, and to the point. Ideally, you should aim to go through at least five or more rounds of presenting and collecting feedback from others before your big meeting.

3. Answer The REAL Questions

All the top presentation designers will tell you that you need to get to the “meat” of your presentation as quickly and succinctly as possible. You need to think about all the important questions your potential investors will ask, and then address them in your presentation.

Here’s list of nine common questions that will most likely be going through your investors’ minds during your meeting. Make sure to answer each of these questions one at a time (one answer per slide!).

1. What’s your company and why should I care? – Make sure to be brief with your personal and company bio, and show them why they should believe in YOU.

2. What’s the size of the opportunity? – What’s the size of your target market and how is it changing? How much of the market can you actually capture?

3. What’s the problem you’re solving? When you’re talking about this, make sure to show why investors should care EMOTIONALLY about your company.

4. What’s the solution? This is where you show the big reveal! Make sure to present your solution in a VISUAL way so your investors can easily understand what your solution is. Screenshots and video demos are often used here to help illustrate your idea.

5. How does it work? Again, you want to make sure that you are visually showing people how your idea works. Make sure to keep things SIMPLE and not overcomplicate the process with too much technical information.

6. Who’s your competition? Talk about the main players in your industry and, more importantly, talk about how your company is BETTER.

7. How are you going to grow? What’s your marketing and distribution plan? Talk about how you have a solid plan to reach the market that you said you were going to capture.

8. How much money do you need? This is where you talk about how much money you need, what you plan do with the money, and how long it will last.

9. Wait, what was that again? Make sure to end with a strong summary slide to remind investors of the most important aspects of your story.

4. Don’t Overload Your Investors With Too Much Information

When it comes to pitch presentations, LESS IS OFTEN MORE. You might feel the urge to cram other information into your deck (e.g., your go-to market plans or product roadmap), but it’s better to keep things short and crisp to drive your most important messages home. If you think there are some additional items that your investors will probably ask about, put them in an appendix at the end of the deck.

5. Make Sure To Constantly Fine-Tune and Tweak

Always adjust your presentation depending on who your audience is and what the interests and concerns were from your previous presentations. The more you pitch the more you learn, so use what you’ve learnt for the next meeting.

Conclusion

Putting together an awesome investor deck can be long process, but it’s worth your while if it leads you to raising needed capital.

What are some of your presentation experiences with investor pitches? If you haven’t done an investor presentation, how do you plan on using these tips? Please be as specific as possible.

Also, do you have a friend who has an important investor pitch coming up, and could benefit from this information? If so, make sure to email mail them a link to this post.

** Do you have a boring presentation that you need to make exciting. Contact us today, and lets discuss your business project!